The American health reform movement of the 1830s and 1840s was a campaign to better both individuals and society at large by the correction of personal hygienic practices. The proposed research, to be pursued through the study of the movement's own numerous publications, supplemented by the contemporaneous literature of other reform groups, the medical profession, biological scientists, and the public press, is intended to provide the first comprehensive study of the origins, programs, goals and achievements of the movement, and to place it in perspective within the broad context of Jacksonian reform activity. The health reformers' seemingly prosaic pronouncements on diet, drink, dress and the like will be shown to stem from that melange of progressive ideas which incited so many other reform campaigns in the 1830s. The hygienists' particular enthusiasms, the areas of physiology, medicine, religion and education will be explored, and their compounding of these ingredients into not just a code of healthier living, but also a program for full medical and social regeneration will be analyzed. Finally, the reform's impact on medical thought and practice, physical education, and personal hygiene will be evaluated. Results of the study will be published in monograph form.